Are there some Japanese exclusive games from days gone by that you always wish you could've played? Did your favourite obscure franchise get a game release in Japan but never saw localization or a fan made translation hack? Well it's your lucky day.

Interpreter is a new project that can live-translate Japanese text in retro games, all offline and without a required internet connection.

The application is optimized for retro games that use traditional pixel-based fonts and uses MeikiOCR. The tool offers two overlay modes - a simple banner overlay as seen above or by replacing text directly over the original Japanese text at OCR-detected positions.

Windows, macOS and Linux installers are available, and after the initial model is downloaded, everything runs offline for privacy and speed.

GitHub source

 

[NeoGranzon]

Those two sentences are functionally identical

@x65943 no because in English it's thanks to everyone in Japanese it's thanks guys,the meaning will be yours but between what is written on the screen and the audio there is a difference,if the translation was correct on the screen it should say thank you guys and not thanks to everyone,that's why i say it's not a perfect translation.

 

[x65943]

@x65943 no because in English it's thanks to everyone in Japanese it's thanks guys,the meaning will be yours but between what is written on the screen and the audio there is a difference,if the translation was correct on the screen it should say thank you guys and not thanks to everyone,that's why i say it's not a perfect translation.

But guys and everyone are used similarly in English

 

[NeoGranzon]

But guys and everyone are used similarly in English

@x65943 listen and read this video

in english is Eureka in japanese Is Yurika,isn't translate correctly.

 

[SecureBoot]

Those two sentences are functionally identical

Furthermore, that is taking the assumption that English and Japanese have a 1:1 vocabulary which is not at all how language works. みな (mina) translates to the concept of everyone. So "thank you everyone" is a direct literal translation. I don't know the context in which it was given, but it's possible that the character or setting would make "thank you guys" more in line with the spirit of original line. The direct translation for "guys" (which I guess would be 男たち or men) does not have the same meaning in all situations as the word "guys" does in english which can mean "men" or "us" or "all of you" ("the guy's restroom" "we did it guys" "you guys are the worst")

 

[zonk47]

Fine for VNs, pretty useless for everything else.

 

[LightBeam]

Looks very promising

I wish this could be used for DQ XI, not the chibi offline version. I still yearn for a proper version of it, even offline or coop-only

 

[NeoGranzon]

Furthermore, that is taking the assumption that English and Japanese have a 1:1 vocabulary which is not at all how language works. みな (mina) translates to the concept of everyone. So "thank you everyone" is a direct literal translation. I don't know the context in which it was given, but it's possible that the character or setting would make "thank you guys" more in line with the spirit of original line. The direct translation for "guys" (which I guess would be 男たち or men) does not have the same meaning in all situations as the word "guys" does in english which can mean "men" or "us" or "all of you" ("the guy's restroom" "we did it guys" "you guys are the worst")

@SecureBoot this Is translation for thanks you everyone=皆さんありがとう instead ありがとうみんな what Kamille says at the end of the dialogue.

 

[sarkwalvein]

are you confident in the translation?

I'm starting to think it was trained on hentai

View attachment 549529

Oh I see...

Remember back in the day when DeJap first translated Tales of Phantasia, how they added a lot of funny (but not existing in the original) sexual innuendo to the translation... Well, I think their usage of Tales of Phantasia in the sample pictures for the project is not a coincidence... they are going for that style intentionally! (perhaps? /s)

 

[Mayo1990]

Could use some additional tweaks lol

 

[catsdownloadtextures]

Finding some strange translations here and there as well. Project has promise though.

 

[Nakamichi]

ooof... yeah, that did not work too well. it found the retroarch window for FCEumm early on, tried again, no luck, tried with swanstation, no luck.

EDIT: just keep refreshing the list and trying to select the right window, eventually it will hook on, but that yellow border around the screen is gonna end up murdering my OLED. Hope we can toggle that on and off someday.

 

[SecureBoot]

View attachment 549576

Could use some additional tweaks lol

Definitely trained on hentai lmao

 

[Nakamichi]

Oh I see...

Remember back in the day when DeJap first translated Tales of Phantasia, how they added a lot of funny (but not existing in the original) sexual innuendo to the translation... Well, I think their usage of Tales of Phantasia in the sample pictures for the project is not a coincidence... they are going for that style intentionally! (perhaps? /s)

"I bet Arche fucks like a tiger"
... never forget.

 

[Sir Tortoise]

Non-AI tools for this already exist, I'd be curious to see how this stacks up against ZTranslate or whatever Retroarch does.
I have a feeling that the bruteforce approach of a LLM won't be well suited to something like this. Fast, offline, accurate, pick one.

Oh, it's also vibe coded. The latest update attempts to solve a crash on Windows, and it does this by reverting a change that was done to fix something on Linux. Have fun with this one, guys.

 

[SeltzerMist]

One of the rare instances I'm supportive of AI technology

 

[VinsCool]

Non-AI tools for this already exist, I'd be curious to see how this stacks up against ZTranslate or whatever Retroarch does.
I have a feeling that the bruteforce approach of a LLM won't be well suited to something like this. Fast, offline, accurate, pick one.

Oh, it's also vibe coded. The latest update attempts to solve a crash on Windows, and it does this by reverting a change that was done to fix something on Linux. Have fun with this one, guys.

This is why we can't have nice things.

 

[NostalgicMillennial]

I wonder how much Youtube and Tiktok will be flooded with bad/comedic translations using this?

Ugh I can already see the "" brainrot

 

[Minox]

are you confident in the translation?

I'm starting to think it was trained on hentai

View attachment 549529

Looking at the text behind it it's indeed misinterpreting things but I would guess it comes from the hiragana usage. If you know the context it's easy to understand the correct/intended meaning, but assuming the AI is treating each new text one by one it likely has no context at all.

@SecureBoot this Is translation for thanks you everyone=皆さんありがとう instead ありがとうみんな what Kamille says at the end of the dialogue.

The latter is a more informal way of speaking hence it likely attempts to make it less formal in English as well which "Thank you guys" would achieve.

 

[MarkDarkness]

I have been wondering for a really long time when we were going to get something like this!

 

[NostalgicMillennial]

Ah shit this looks great but the AI model was trained on hentai and Eroge games.